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Harrison "Glitch" Sync
Basics Character Name : Harrison "Glitch" Sync In-game Name : Glitch Played by : Valiant Maverick Character Race : Human Character Age : 21 Cycles Character Gender : Male Description 167 cm tall. Trim build with some muscular definition but little bulk. Prosthetic left arm and hand. Artificial right eye crossed by a faint scar. Unkempt or close-cropped brown hair, depending on whether or not it has been cut recently. Close-cropped brown beard and (usually) clean-shaven neck. History Harrison Sync grew up in a sparsely populated district of Port Vittar. His parents were both highly educated and he himself began his education at home. Harrison’s father Jacob was an engineer who began his career in the biomedical field and later branched out into several other disciplines. His mother Mai held a degree in nursing and education and taught at the local community college until Harrison was born. She then dedicated herself to his care and education (with help from Harrison’s father). After Harrison's father took over his education in full, his mother resumed her old career. Harrison was home-educated for six years by his mother, and then by his mother and father for six years more as he began to learn advanced mathematics and some technological studies. His father then took over in full, educating him in the field as an intern in computer and robotics engineering. During his time as an intern, he earned the call sign “Glitch” for his quirky behavior and occasionally odd or comical facial expressions. At the age of 19, Glitch earned his own engineering license by a combination of exams and his already extensive portfolio of achievements in the fields of software, electronics, plasma physics, and theoretical physics. After earning his license, Glitch was invited to work on a team investigating FTL travel. He eagerly accepted the offer. On the side, he began attending flight school and earned a space flight rating before his 20th birthday, upon which a momentous discovery was made. For the first time in 1000 years, FTL travel was possible again! Preparations began immediately for the first faster-than-light voyage. Glitch was an obvious choice for one of the crew both because of his skill set and his uncommonly high intelligence. He also proved more resistant to the negative effects of zero gravity than most humans. The time came for the voyage and all was ready. The intrepid crew boarded the R.N.V. Celestus and launched from the moon Tyr and out into the void. Some minutes later… “Sir, we are approaching the waypoint,” the navigator announced excitedly. “Excellent,” replied the captain as he turned to Glitch with a grin. “Sync, get that contraption ready.” “Charging the jump drive, sir!” Glitch appeared ready to drool on the blinking control panel as he adjusted the power settings and started charging the drive. “Jim, I need those coordinates from the nav computer.” The navigator dialed in the coordinates and transferred them to Glitch’s station. Glitch grinned almost manically as the drive neared its full charge. “Drive ready, sir!” he barked. “Engage,” commanded the captain. Glitch punched it. The capacitors hummed, the ship lurched, and the drive screamed. Everything outside began to stretch and blur, then a bright light flashed in front of the ship and ribbons of purple streaked along the ship’s course and blurred into a vibrant, violet tunnel. Moments later the ship emerged in a new star system a few light-minutes from a planet thought to have a habitable nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. Then disaster struck. A howler alarm blared and warnings appeared on every console on the bridge. “Report!” barked the captain. “Capacitor malfunction. No time to explain, sir, but it’s bad!” replied Glitch. He saw that the main capacitor bank had overheated from the sudden power draw when the drive was activated. The extreme heat had caused one of the regulators to melt and short-circuit, worsening the problem. With a short and no regulator, the capacitors would continue to heat up rather than cooling down and would rupture long before the power ran out, creating the equivalent of a small plasma bomb. For some reason, the circuit breaker had failed to trip. “Do what you have to..” the captain began, but stopped as Glitch dashed from the bridge. “And he’s already on it,” he said to himself. “The rest of you do what you can to help!” The captain stood up and followed Glitch and the rest of the bridge crew followed him. Glitch lurched into the engineering bay and grabbed an insulated wrench from a compartment in the wall. He jammed the wrench into the flimsy, half-melted casing of the capacitor regulator and ripped it free. The front casing and some fragments floated across the bay. The regulator was done for. Glitch kicked off the wall and flung himself at the circuit breaker panel. He flung the service hatch open and looked inside… right into a face-full of electrical inferno. A piece of hot metal flung by the expanding air around the arc struck him on the right side of the face. Stunned, he floated backward as the captain flew into the bay. Glitch tried to grab a nearby handhold and launch himself back at the panel but he was too far away. “Trip breaker 12!” he gasped. “MEDIC!” the captain yelled over his shoulder. He grabbed Glitch by the shoulder and began dragging the injured young man toward the hatch. “The breaker…” groaned Glitch “or we all die!” “Kill breaker 12!” the captain yelled at the first officer who followed. The officer flung himself at the panel, then looked back at the others in dismay. “It’s fused together! What now!?” Glitch thought fast – smashing a fragile relay in a panel to his left would open the circuit and stop the capacitors from overheating, but would likely create a dangerous arc for a moment. Though he could no longer see out of his right eye, he shook off the pain and grabbed the wrench which had fortunately floated within arm’s length. He swung it at the panel with all his might. The wrench struck home with a metallic clang. A jet of plasma erupted through the thin panel as the power conduit in the relay shattered. “Fizzing hell!” the captain swore in surprise. As the air inside the relay panel expanded with the heat, it pushed the arcing plasma outward, burning cleanly through Glitch’s left arm. He screamed in pain as his arm separated from his body. The captain yanked his other shoulder, pulling him clear before the arc could reach his face. As the young engineer’s consciousness faded, he could faintly hear the captain swearing and the first officer saying “…He saved the ship.” Glitch awoke minutes later in the medical bay. His face was bandaged and he could feel no pain. He could hear the ship’s medic asking someone to hand him a hypo-srynge before everything faded back into black. It took some days for Glitch to recover enough to move from his bed. He had lost both his left arm and his right eye. During that time the crew began repairs and completed a survey of the planet which was indeed habitable and already teeming with life remarkably similar to Port Vittar’s, although wild and untamed. After recovering slightly, Glitch suggested making the return voyage in several shorter jumps to preserve what was left of the capacitor bank. The Celestus returned to Tyr without further incident. Before returning home, Glitch checked into a hospital on Tyr to be fitted with prosthetics. As the connecting tissues of his shoulder had been damaged, he elected to have the arm replaced clear up to the shoulder rather than keeping the remaining stump. His right eye was replaced as well. Being the techno-nerd he is, Glitch elected to have a luminescent iris rather than a natural-looking one. He later tweaked the eye’s firmware to allow him to switch it to infrared with a remote control, although he found that he must close one eye or the other to keep from getting dizzy while his artificial one is in infrared mode. Glitch’s parents met him on Tyr and they traveled home together. Since the birth of the colony movement, Glitch has turned his attention to the starts. With his parents’ blessing, he will soon depart Port Vittar and begin a new career among the stars. Whatever path he chooses, he will probably find himself inventing things as he goes. He has also determined to learn personal combat skills to help him survive the dangers that he will no doubt face on the frontier and upon the coldest sea, the void of space.